On Episcopal Cafe, there is an interesting article on “rethinking the religious box score.”  It talks about how in baseball the on base percentage may be more important than the hits and RBIs listed in the box score (and a pitchers ratio of ground balls to fly balls may be more important than ERA).  In applying it to the Roman Catholic Church, John Allen says (in the National Catholic Reporter) that

If you want a measure of how over-emphasis on a limited set of categories distorts perceptions, consider this: Barrels of ink have been spilled dissecting the Vatican’s outreach to disgruntled Anglicans, which, realistically, might bring a few thousand new members into the church worldwide. Here you have an effort to integrate 1.3 million folks more thoroughly into the church, and it flies below radar — because, of course, ministry to the deaf doesn’t open a new front in the culture wars, which is a category we in the West take very seriously indeed.

To which the folks at Episcopal Cafe add

So the question to we Episcopalians is this: what things do we value and how does this distort or enhance our picture of the church, the world, and the people we are called to minister to? What would “Sabermetrics” for the Episcopal Church look like?

If you want to see the whole article, you can find it here.